28 April 2014

Found Time

One of the realities of life in a law office is that your day rarely precedes as expected.

One day, your gear up for a project that you expect to take up half of your day; the next, the deal is busted or the case is settled. Sometimes a client hits traffic on I-70 coming to Denver and has to reschedule for the following day. A deposition is cancelled because a witness is sick. A court date is continued late in the afternoon before the hearing that was to take up the following day.

Typically, at any given time, two-thirds to three-quarters of the items on my "to do" list have a caveat, because the ball in that matter is in someone else's court and we can't act until we receive more information or action. Maybe the next action item for us is a reply brief and the response brief hasn't yet been filed. Maybe, the next step is to establish a business entity, but we are waiting for a client to decide on its name, or the ownership percentages. A plan to establish an independent distributorship morphs into drafting an executive compensation agreement for a manager of a branch office and we must wait while the deal is renegotiated.

The bottom line is that several times a day, an e-mail or call (often it used to be a fax, but nobody uses faxes anymore), will interrupt the plan for the day and send us scampering off in a new direction, or with a big hole in our schedule. Even more often there are moments of found time. It is five o'clock and you have a meeting at five thirty, but no item on the "to do" list requires a block of time less than one hour if you want to be efficient about it.

So, you pause, gossip. grab a snack, blog, or whatever until it is showtime again.